From Uncle Joe to the boy George

Damian Thompson reviews Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia by John Gray

The human project to create a perfect society - which grew out of Christian fantasies of the Millennium and produced the deadly fruit of Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot - has died in the sands of Iraq. The attempt to export democracy to the Gulf was so crazy that its failure has killed off not just neoconservative ideology but also utopia itself.

That is the central thesis of John Gray's new book, and it really is a load of bollocks.

Gray, a professor at the LSE who is described on the front cover as "the most important living philosopher", has had a fit of Bush-hatred spectacular even by the standards of important living philosophers. But, rather than getting it out of his system over a macrobiotic soufflé in Hampstead, the silly man has gone and built an entire theory of history around it.

This means that - quite apart from the fatuity of its arguments - Black Mass will have a very short shelf-life. In a few years' time, it will read a bit like a study of political philosophy in which America's involvement in Vietnam is the culminating act of folly in Western history. Judging by the tone of his writing, Gray is well insulated by self-esteem, but I'd like to think that, one day, even he will pick up this book and wince like a drunkard remembering what he said the previous night.

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Here's the argument. Jesus and his early followers believed that a perfect world would come to pass after an earth-shattering confrontation with Satan. This apocalyptic belief was given a makeover by the Enlightenment, whose concept of "progress" was also teleological. The Greek world telos means "end"; the end in this case was a world governed by reason - a politically engineered utopia. Twentieth-century totalitarianism tried to bring about a progressive utopia by acting out medieval apocalyptic fantasies of the mass extinction of the enemy.

So far, so good. The link between Christian millenarianism and Nazism, the Bible's 1,000-year reign of the saints and the 1,000-year Reich, is well established. But Gray also sniffs out a trail from Auschwitz back to the salons of the Enlightenment: to Voltaire, who thought that Jews could some day become "deadly to the human race", and to Kant, who thought Negroes were predisposed to slavery. This is interesting, as is the information that Stalin had peasant women inseminated with ape sperm in an attempt to produce soldier ape-men who would be resistant to pain.

Then, unfortunately, Gray goes almost as nuts as Uncle Joe. He thinks that the apocalyptic torch has been passed from Pol Pot to George W Bush, who practises mass terror to create an Iraqi utopia dreamt up by shadowy neoconservatives. And most of them stay in the shadows, because Gray can't come up with more than a few names: Wolfowitz, Kristol, Perle and a couple of other Jews (he is sufficiently nervous to leave out this detail). Rumsfeld, on the other hand, was never interested in neocon ideology. Indeed, by Gray's own account, one of the most important motives for the invasion of Iraq was the search for a source of oil that would let the US decouple itself from terrorist-sponsoring Saudi Arabia. Not very utopian.

Perhaps aware that he is running short of neocons to man his conspiracy, Gray presses Tony Blair into service. The former Prime Minister was not only a classic neocon, we learn, but one whose mendacity bore the stamp of Soviet disinformation: an American poodle and a red under the bed. Bush, though, is not so much a slippery neocon as an old-style fundamentalist Christian whose policies are designed to hasten global warming (sound of box being ticked) and therefore the end of the world. The CIA, meanwhile, has been taken over by shape-shifting lizards telepathically controlled by the ghost of Milton Friedman.

OK, so perhaps that last sentence misrepresents Gray's argument; but Black Mass could hardly be more bonkers if it really was crawling with lizards. Although Gray is by no stretch of the imagination our most important living philosopher, he does slightly remind me of Bertrand Russell in his dotage - a clever man playing to the gallery.

But it's getting late, professor: the main actors have either left the stage or are heading for the wings, and the only people left in the gallery are a few Independent readers. Go home and sleep it off.